EPA To Create Army Of Worker Drones
Team BO has finally found a way to create new jobs; in this case, it’s a veritable army of new government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, and wholly unsurprising, it will come at the cost of increased regulation that is almost certain to kill business and, by extension, actual, private-sector job creation:
The Environmental Protection Agency has said new greenhouse gas regulations, as proposed, may be “absurd” in application and “impossible to administer” by its self-imposed 2016 deadline. But the agency is still asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden of up to 230,000 new bureaucrats — at a cost of $21 billion — to attempt to implement the rules.
The EPA aims to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the Clean Air Act, even though the law doesn’t give the EPA explicit power to do so. The agency’s authority to move forward is being challenged in court by petitioners who argue that such a decision should be left for Congress to make.
The proposed regulations would set greenhouse gas emission thresholds above which businesses must file for an EPA permit and complete extra paperwork in order to continue operating. If the EPA wins its court battle and fully rolls out the greenhouse gas regulations, the number of businesses forced into this regulatory regime would grow tremendously — from approximately 14,000 now to as many as 6.1 million.
And that $21B price tag doesn’t include the economic impact the regulations are likely to crater out of businesses forced to comply with standards designed to create hundreds of thousands of pencil-pushing positions in the public sector.
So to recap: a slate of new environmental regulations that even the EPA concedes are “absurd” in any practical sense and will be “impossible to administer” will create 230,000 government bureaucrats at a cost of $21 billion.
There’s a reason why every GOP candidate running for president is in agreement on at least one policy point: the immediate need to dismantle the EPA and start over from scratch.
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